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module: add syscall to load module from fd
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As part of the effort to create a stronger boundary between root and
kernel, Chrome OS wants to be able to enforce that kernel modules are
being loaded only from our read-only crypto-hash verified (dm_verity)
root filesystem. Since the init_module syscall hands the kernel a module
as a memory blob, no reasoning about the origin of the blob can be made.

Earlier proposals for appending signatures to kernel modules would not be
useful in Chrome OS, since it would involve adding an additional set of
keys to our kernel and builds for no good reason: we already trust the
contents of our root filesystem. We don't need to verify those kernel
modules a second time. Having to do signature checking on module loading
would slow us down and be redundant. All we need to know is where a
module is coming from so we can say yes/no to loading it.

If a file descriptor is used as the source of a kernel module, many more
things can be reasoned about. In Chrome OS's case, we could enforce that
the module lives on the filesystem we expect it to live on.  In the case
of IMA (or other LSMs), it would be possible, for example, to examine
extended attributes that may contain signatures over the contents of
the module.

This introduces a new syscall (on x86), similar to init_module, that has
only two arguments. The first argument is used as a file descriptor to
the module and the second argument is a pointer to the NULL terminated
string of module arguments.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> (merge fixes)
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Kees Cook authored and Rusty Russell committed Dec 14, 2012
1 parent 84ecfd1 commit 34e1169
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Showing 5 changed files with 223 additions and 148 deletions.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions arch/x86/syscalls/syscall_32.tbl
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Expand Up @@ -356,3 +356,4 @@
347 i386 process_vm_readv sys_process_vm_readv compat_sys_process_vm_readv
348 i386 process_vm_writev sys_process_vm_writev compat_sys_process_vm_writev
349 i386 kcmp sys_kcmp
350 i386 finit_module sys_finit_module
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions arch/x86/syscalls/syscall_64.tbl
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Expand Up @@ -319,6 +319,7 @@
310 64 process_vm_readv sys_process_vm_readv
311 64 process_vm_writev sys_process_vm_writev
312 common kcmp sys_kcmp
313 common finit_module sys_finit_module

#
# x32-specific system call numbers start at 512 to avoid cache impact
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions include/linux/syscalls.h
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Expand Up @@ -868,4 +868,5 @@ asmlinkage long sys_process_vm_writev(pid_t pid,

asmlinkage long sys_kcmp(pid_t pid1, pid_t pid2, int type,
unsigned long idx1, unsigned long idx2);
asmlinkage long sys_finit_module(int fd, const char __user *uargs);
#endif
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